PROGRESSIVE BOOKS/Alvena Bieri

Flat Broke With Children

Any book recommended by Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and
Dimed, I will pick up with a sense of anticipation. That's what I did
with Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform by
Sharon Hays [New York: Oxford, 2003].

Hays is a sociologist at the University of Virginia and gives a
down-to-earth treatment of the plight of welfare mothers today,
telling us at the beginning that her mother-in-law was such a mother.
Yet she did an excellent job of bringing up her husband and his three
sisters under those hard circumstances.

During the Clinton administration in 1996 "welfare reform" became
the law. The present program is called TANF, or Temporary Aid to
Needy Families. It replaced AFDC, Aid to Families with Dependent
Children. The federal time limit in the new program is five
years.

Hays says that ironically it cost a lot of money to start the
present system.

She reports on her research in two cities which she dubs
Arbordale and Sunbelt City -- not their real names. Arbordale is a
traditional-feeling small city somewhere in the southeast, and
Sunbelt City is, we assume, in the great southwest. She writes with
authority because the main part of her research was done interviewing
caseworkers, seeing what forms the applicants have to fill out, and
what they have to say about the system in their own homes. Many
individual cases are examined here in detail. She concludes that the
feel of an overwhelming bureaucracy is worse in Sunbelt City than in
Arbordale.

Being at the mercy of a bureaucracy is an experience most of us
have had, but being in that awkward situation as a single mother
needing the necessities for her children must be exceptionally
painful. The applicant has to answers questions like, "Do you have
any cash in your purse or at home? Do you have a checking or savings
account? Do you get any money from work on the side, like babysitting
or other odd jobs?" and dozens of other questions which are followed
by long explanations of the intricacies of the program.

The poverty in the country with the greatest gap between rich and
poor of all industrialized nations is ironic and tragic. Hays writes
that by 1998 over 40% of children being brought up by single mothers
were in families with earnings of less than $12,500 a year. The fact
is that today millions of children are in working families with
incomes below the poverty line.

The complexity of the welfare problem is seen too in the welfare
recipients themselves. Many support the idea that they should be
working full time despite the lack of supports like child care they
can afford. Yet it is hard not to be down and discouraged when jobs
are hard to find and don't pay very well. Many welfare mothers go in
and out of the system. They work awhile, get laid off, go back on
welfare, work again, and the cycle goes on.

The author concludes that the old "family ideal of an independent
bread-winning husband and a dependent domestic wife, bound together
for life by their complementary roles, is, realistically speaking,
outdated." And trying these days to get an errant father to keep up
child support payments is, I'm sure, a full time job in itself. An
increase in the minimum wage for everyone might help, if it were big
enough.

Then think about this: Most of the people on welfare in this
country are children. For the sake of our future as a free country
and for a community spirit that cares about children, they ought to
be helped. It shouldn't be like a Republican-type cartoon I saw a
couple of years ago. It showed a well-dressed man talking to a boy
playing on a swing in his slum-like neighborhood. The man exclaimed,
"What? You are eight years old and you've never had a full time
job?"

Ehrenreich was right. This is a good book which ought to be taken
very seriously.